8814(AKA 8890) Review After 2 days of testing it

This review will not go into great detail or length, nor am I providing pictures as there are plenty on the net already, I will be expressing my thoughts on this laptop and most important, benchmark results...

I recieved my laptop yesterday morning, shipping was great, very well packaged. When first recieving the laptop one could defintely get intimidated if you never ordered a sager/prostar before..this thing is huge. but not much bigger than my previous toshiba 5205-s705. Weight is not really a concern to me as I'm a pretty big guy and do not mind lugging heavy notebooks around from client to client.

Specs:

16' laptop
3.2 ghz desktop processor
60gb 7200 rpm drive
1 gb ram
Built in 802.11 Wireless Lan


The screen is beautiful, I could not find one dead pixel. DVD playback is great! Below are the games I have run on it.

Tron 2.0
Jedi Knight Jedi Outcast
Medal of Honor AA/Spearhead
GTA3
GTA Vice City
No One Lives Forever 2
Warcraft 3/Frozen Throne

All the above games run awesome in 1024x768(I never run above this as the text in games gets smaller than it needs to be). 1024x768 with 4x AA turned on looks good enough to me. And everything ran great without a hickup. I've previously owned a dell inspiron 8200 and toshiba 5205-s705 and this just blows them both out of the water. While games ran fine on these 2 models they just were not super smooth, on this laptop they are. I'm sure this is greatly helped by an actual desktop processor and the 7200 rpm HD, along with the ATI9600. I did not go through specific benchmarks but trust me guys, its freaking fast.

I do not like 3mark2003, I still use 3dmark 2001. And I got 10798(standard, AA turned off) on 3dmark 2001SE Build 330(registered). Finally we have achieved the 10000+ mark on a laptop, again awesome.

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Battery Life: I disabled the CPU clock mgmt and decided to run this at full speed on the battery. I achieved the same benchmarks in 3dmark2001 and this was great.

A fully charged battery played a dvd for an hour and a half before the battery died, for a desktop processor this is damn good, I'm guessing playing a game will yield the same result. (Considering I got slightly over this with my toshiba 5205-s705, I'm very content with this) I'm glad I bought a spare battery though. I wish there was an easier way to swap the battery and you have to go through 4 screws to do this, but not a huge deal...

The portable MP3 player that plug into the side is defintely a nice touch. While not the greatest of quality I've seen much worse, comes with a cute leather case too. Kudos to Pro-Star for all the little extras.

Sound: Defintely the weak point of this laptop. Being spoiled by the Toshiba 5205-s705 was defintely part of this, the toshiba even has a mini-subwoofer in a laptop. If anyone here can tell me a way to turn up the volume(other than the volume control and windows speaker setting mgmt, which are all maxed) I would be most greatful.

Remote: While I could be wrong from what I've seen so far this is mostly for the tv tuner...and I can not find a way to control dvd input with it(Play, Menu, next/previous chapter, etc) If anyone has figured this out please let me know.

Ports: Wow, 4 USB ports built in, DVI(comes with a vga converter), firewire, pcmcia, even serial! No need for a usb hub with this unit. Very pleased!

Free Case: Standard notebook briefcase, while it will hold the laptop and a few extras, I stuck with my Eddie Bauer case which holds it all! I gave this to my fiancee tho to use with my old toshiba.

All in all this is the best laptop I've ever owned. Unlike the before mentioned models, I now truly feel I have something equal to my 3.2 ghz desktop that I can carry on the go.

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